Edison obtained a patent for the motion picture camera or "Kinetograph". He handled the electromechanical design while his employee WKL Dickson, a photographer, worked on the photographic and optical development. Much of the credit for the invention belongs to Dickson. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay In 1891, Thomas Edison built a kinetoscope, or peephole viewer. This device was installed in arcades, where people could watch short, simple movies. The kinetograph and kinetoscope were both first displayed to the public on May 20, 1891. In April 1896, Thomas Armat's Vitascope was used to project films at public screenings in New York City. Later, he performed films with vocal soundtracks on cylinder recordings, mechanically synchronized with the film. The kinetoscope officially entered Europe when the wealthy American businessman Irving T. Bush (1869-1948) purchased a dozen machines from the Continental Commerce Company of Frank Z. Maguire and Joseph D. Baucus. Bush placed the first kinetoscopes in London starting from 17 October 1894. At the same time, the French company Kinétoscope Edison Michel et Alexis Werner purchased these machines for the French market. In the last three months of 1894, the Continental Commerce Company sold hundreds of kinetoscopes in Europe (i.e., the Netherlands and Italy). In Germany and Austria-Hungary the kinetoscope was introduced by the Deutsche-österreichische-Edison-Kinetoscop Gesellschaft, founded by Ludwig Stollwerck of Schokoladen-Süsswarenfabrik Stollwerck & Co in Cologne. The first kinetoscopes arrived in Belgium at Fairs in early 1895. Edison's Kinétoscope Français, a Belgian company, was founded in Brussels on January 15, 1895, with the right to sell kinetoscopes in Monaco, France and the French colonies. The main investors in this company were Belgian industrialists. On May 14, 1895, Edison's Kinétoscope Belge was founded in Brussels. Entrepreneur Ladislas-Victor Lewitzki, based in London but active in Belgium and France, took the initiative to start this business. He had contacts with Leon Gaumont and the American Mutoscope and Biograph Co. In 1898 he also became a shareholder of the Biograph and Mutoscope Company for France. Edison's film studio made nearly 1,200 films. Most of the productions were short films featuring everything from acrobats to parades to fire calls, including such titles as The Sneeze of Fred Ott (1894), The Kiss (1896), The Great Train Robbery (1903), The Adventures of Alice in Wonderland (1910), and the first Frankenstein film in 1910. In 1903, when the owners of Luna Park, Coney Island, announced that they would execute the elephant Topsy by strangulation, poisoning and electrocution (with part of the electrocution that would ultimately kill the elephant), Edison Manufacturing sent a team to film it, releasing it that same year under the title Electrocuting an Elephant. File:A Day with Thomas Edison (1922). Please note: this is just an example. Get a custom paper from our expert writers now. Get a Custom Essay The motion picture business expanded, and competing exhibitors regularly copied and showed each other's films. To better protect the copyright on his films, Edison deposited prints on long strips of photographic paper with the US Copyright Office. Many of these paper prints survived longer and in better condition than the actual films of that era. In 1908, Edison founded the Motion Picture Patents Company, which was a conglomerate of nine major motion picture studios 1929.